


Tiny Games

by changdictator



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: James Bond AU, Kingsman AU, M/M, Tinker Tailor AU, basically every spy au, bourne supremacy au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-20
Updated: 2018-11-20
Packaged: 2019-08-26 08:23:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16678027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/changdictator/pseuds/changdictator
Summary: MI6, CIA, and Kingsman enter a somewhat petty and equally convoluted squabble over resourcing wet work assets. Or alternatively, as Chanyeol fondly puts it: "a little gunfire, a lot of funerals, a truckload of corpses in my backyard, but none of these assholes are dead."





	Tiny Games

In the autopsy report, Lancelot, or Kai, or Outcome  five, or some other alias of Kim Jongin’s, had a four-inch knife wound which slit his neck to the bone. Kyungsoo, dubbed rather casually as MI6 shrapnel, was shot so cleanly through the face that only two molars was left dangling off his jaw. Both corpses were charred during the shipwreck, then rotten past recognition after a few weeks feeding New York’s marine life.  Identification had to be done through DNA and dental analysis on what remained.  
  
“Merlin, do I want to ask where you found the bodies?” Jongin frowns at the photographs displayed in the projection.  
  
“Um,” Sehun’s voice returns, nonchalant from behind the newspaper. He flips to a new page of the Saturday funnies, then reaches to steal a crisp out of Jongin’s bowl. Sehun is the kind of operative who would trip over every plant on his way to work, end up stuck in a traffic jam and get mugged by his own target twice before he even pulled out his gun. Despite all that he still manages, miraculously, a damned good job at playing Merlin. “Your freezer.”  
  
Jongin sighs through his nose. This isn’t the first time Sehun has stuck something in his kitchen. Back in second grade, Sehun had locked an unconscious bully in Jongin’s cupboard. In high school, Jongin’s deceased dog in the fridge. At CIA, the severed arm of a neighborhood gangster in the dish washer. Now, after two decades of playing Easter egg hunt with body parts in his cabinets, Jongin is beyond surprise. It's become a logistical matter. He pulls off his glasses and dead-pans. “My  _freezer_? How did you even cram them in there?”  
  
The newspaper wavers. Jongin catches a glimpse of Sehun’s intensely vapid dead fish eyes as he answers, candid and tactless, “I bought a new chain-saw.”  
  
At least he’s honest. “The neighbors didn’t mind the noise?”  
  
Sehun goes quiet for a second, then says, “Not the living ones, anyway.”   
  
Jongin squints suspiciously but doesn’t pry. It always works out in the end. How it does, Jongin has no idea. It’s impossible for him to. Sehun operates on another plane of intelligence altogether, like he was made of the same bones and flesh but in a different order. Back at MIT, the professors had sworn Sehun was intellectually superhuman. Sehun would go places. Sehun could revolutionize the world one day just sitting there watching day dramas in his pajamas. They toasted to it, at every luncheon club.  
  
If only they knew Sehun’s currently spending his three doctorates and two dozen Nature headliners revolutionizing cadaver tetris and back-door medicine at an international intelligence agency, Jongin muses, sympathetically pushing the snack bowl a little closer to Sehun. Thank god they faked his death ten years ago.  
  
“Don’t strain yourself,” Sehun notes, “I was watching Boys Over Flowers while sewing your side wound so I can’t guarantee you won’t rip open those stitches and lose the life Kyungsoo spared you.”  
  
“He didn’t spare—”  
  
“If we found you one second later, you would’ve drowned in your own blood.”  
  
“I’m sure it was purely coincidental,” Jongin tries weakly.   
  
“Lancelot, be reasonable.” Sehun says, with the exasperated tone of voice you’d only use chastising a pup who’d peed on your sweater for the umpteenth time, “The man practically carved your heart out. Wouldn’t be surprised if he trained the country’s best surgeons.”  
  
  
  


 

♢

  
  
  
  
  
“I’m not a doctor,” Kyungsoo insists, staring flatly at Chanyeol’s clipboard. It’s labeled Arthur. Everyone in the agency is named after a knight, and as if it weren’t the oddest element of an outrageously secretive intelligence organization, Chanyeol is the one they decided to peg as King Arthur. Kyungsoo half hopes the names aren’t arranged intentionally. “I can’t tell you if that’s an STD or blister on your balls.”  
  
Chanyeol squints at whatever file he’s reading and unproductively settles on the same topic he’s been settling on for the past two hours, “But you were a surgeon, yes?”  
  
“I just don’t want to inspect your sack, all right?” Kyungsoo says.  
  
Humming, Chanyeol makes a face like he’s assessing the confession as a matter of life or death. He puts the clipboard down and types something into the computer. “That’s fair.”  
  
Kyungsoo waits. Chanyeol begins shaking his leg. If someone had told Kyungsoo this being trapped in a four-by-four by a git the size of Soviet Union is what joining Kingsman meant, he would’ve stayed for that explosion at the 29th floor.   
  
“Now tomatoes: yay or nay?”  
  
“I’m sorry, what does that have to do with assigning me a handler?”  
  
“Nothing,” Chanyeol shrugs without batting an eye. “I’m just thinking about what to have for lunch. Besides, your handler’s been decided a long time ago.”  
  
“It has?”  
  
“It’s Lancelot.”  
  
Kyungsoo double-takes so hard he actually hears his jaw popping. “Lancelot as in Kim Jongin?”  
  
“You didn’t know?”  
  
“You never told me!”  
  
“Well I suppose that may be because you never asked,” Chanyeol says, looking absolutely baffled that Kyungsoo is at all upset.   
  
“PARK CHAN—”  
  
“It’s Arthur. Now, I know the two of you are not, for example, BFFs—”  
  
“ _Arthur_ , I don’t know if you got the memo, but we blew up half a harbor and sank two freight ships trying to kill each other. We put NORAD on round house within half an hour. And that was last month.”  
  
“See, splendid teamwork already,” Chanyeol remarks. Kyungsoo is sure by this point that the guy’s just playing him. Even the file he’s been pouring over has nothing on it but a coarsely doodled… male genitalia. Or molding oranges. It’s hard to be sure. “And if anything, it appears like the two of you have a common interest already. Homicidal inclinations work brilliantly, kindling a new friendship.”  
  
“I’m not—” Kyungsoo begins, but Chanyeol talks right over him. “Anyway, carry on with your day. Let Merlin show you the pups we have for training. Good afternoon.”  
  
Deflating, Kyungsoo asks as Chanyeol begins packing up, “This is for not inspecting your testicles, isn’t it.”  
  
Chanyeol smiles, polite and neat as a pin, “Not entirely.”  
  
Kyungsoo can feel something inside of him tearing open. Most likely a stressed vein. Or his spleen. “Why me?”  
  
“I’m grooming you,” Chanyeol says, eyes twinkling, “To be Galahad.”  
  
“Grooming,” Kyungsoo echoes, utterly distraught. Not the first thing anyone wants to hear after a year-long engagement of intercontinental kill-or-capture tag, no.   
  
  


 

♢

  
  
  
  
The first time Kyungsoo met Jongin was at an exclusive political function in Tokyo. It was his second year at MI6, first quarter as a Double-O. Back then, he hadn’t an inkling who Jongin was. The grapevine doesn’t open until your third year swimming the circus. So all he saw—all he thought he was seeing—was a guy with pushed back hair and black-rimmed glasses, fiddling with a cigar cutter while chattering away in fluent Chinese. Even in retrospect, with that crisp charcoal three-piece and inoffensive, camera-tailored smile, Jongin would’ve been impossible to tell apart from the rest.  
  
It was purely a coincidence that Kyungsoo noticed the polished edge of indiscretion in Jongin’s form and realized, on second thought, that he couldn’t put a name to that face.  
  
“Sir, can I see your ID please?” Kyungsoo asked, “Just want to be sure.”  
  
Jongin blinked as if he were taken off guard, then leaned in just close enough to whisper, “Of course you can, but I may be a smidgeon above your pay-grade.”  
  
Before Kyungsoo could answer, the Chinese ambassador who Jongin had been courting started screaming. By the time Kyungsoo registered what had happened, Jongin had already vanished. The only thing he left behind was the ambassador’s severed finger and a bloody cigar cutter lodged in Kyungsoo’s breast pocket.  
  
  


 

 

♢

 

  
  
  
  
According to Jongin, the way it happened, Sehun was the one at fault. He’d fished him out of murky Hong Kong waters and offered a choice between a one-way ticket to Arthur’s office—the usual line of discipline for young Kingsman operatives gone whimsically rogue—or a quick job together on a mole in the Chinese foreign policy office. It wasn’t much of a choice, considering Arthur’s office meant Arthur, which meant Chanyeol, which meant peanuts.   
  
“Arthur, he has this habit. He keeps giving me trail mix,” Jongin explained when they met again five months later, chewing thoughtfully on an onigiri, “And I’m half-sure he knows I’m allergic to peanuts.”  
  
“That’s great. How did you find me?” Kyungsoo asked, because Jongin showed up incidentally during his last black ops mission. In retrospect, it should’ve been obvious. The situation had been extremely delicate. He was told to operate at the highest level of discretion, to leave no tracks. His file had been burnt, along with the files of those who had burnt his file. Only one other person in the world was aware of his exact coordinates, and that person died not a day ago.  
  
“I was in the neighborhood,” Jongin said, as if you could pop into the 26th floor window of a five-star hotel by chance. He dug two cans of coffee out of his knapsack, then a single stack stainless 1911 and a suppressor. Kyungsoo watched him line them up in a neat row on the windowsill. “And then I remembered I left a lighter with you.”  
  
Kyungsoo briefly stopped strangling his target, some unfortunate Cuban minister, to squint at Jongin. “It was a cigar cutter, actually.”  
  
“Hand grenade, finger chopper, cigarette lighter, same thing,” Jongin shrugged, settling back against the windowsill. Maybe it was the angle, but he looked every bit as cock-sure and indifferent as he sounded. In that ridiculous suit of his—which looked far too expensive to be carelessly worn that way—Jongin pushed every nerve Kyungsoo didn’t know he had. “Anyway, I’ve got a hit on some Agent 007. Heard of him?”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“MI6 sold him out for a few comments on the inside track.”  
  
“Oh,” Kyungsoo echoed blankly. Honestly, he’d seen this coming. MI6 was leak-proof not because everyone was so great at keeping secrets. This side of the law, dogs grown too strong for leashes aren’t let into the wild, not when they’d grown on bone meal and fresh cuts. Still, he hadn’t expected this to be the end of his life, at the hands of an outsider, in the middle of a city he’d never cared for. Jongin’s words floated at the edge of his conscious but didn’t sink.  
  
As he screwed together the suppressor and gun, the curtains rippled around his frame. Behind him the sky was bright blue and crystal clear. Some rays of sun caught on his white cotton shirt. Jongin lowered the gun with a slow, easy smile. “Please, close your eyes. I can’t aim properly when you’re looking at me like that.”  
  
Without a protest Kyungsoo closed his eyes. Except nothing happened. He kept standing there, heart in his ears, waiting for that whip of pain, the shock of neon behind the lids. Ten seconds later and nothing still. When he opened his eyes again, the minister was already dead, shot clean between the brows. Jongin had long gone. Only one of the bottles of coffee remained.  
  
A storm of dust particles drifted past the silence in Jongin’s place, aflame as they circled into the city. And that’s when the coffee started beeping in duple metre.   
  
Kyungsoo leapt out the window just in time to graze the edge of the explosion. Over the smoke and the bellowing heat, he could make out the ragged concrete edge of the hotel bursting open, spraying fire and glass and heat like some nasty exit wound.  
  
  
  


 

 

♢

 

  
  
  
  
His obituary was printed in the second to last page of the Sunday papers, tucked inconspicuously beneath an ad for car repair. It was written for a Sergeant Kyle Darlington, but MI6 never liked labeling their garbage properly, especially not the ones buried as toxic waste. That very day, Byun Baekhyun phoned in during lunch and told Kyungsoo there was a stack of charges on him sitting in his office and, “It’s blocking my view of the Scotch.”  
  
Kyungsoo picked the olives out of his sandwich. “Good for you.”  
  
“On that note, I have a one-time offer for you.”  
  
“Can’t hear you,” Kyungsoo decided blandly, “Must be the bad reception. Oh, no, the line’s breaking up, got to hang up, call back la—”  
  
“I also have seven black sedans equipped with enough GAU-17/As to cremate a military base parked outside your house,” Baekhyun said, every bit as dully, “How’s the reception now?”  
  
Kyungsoo, with every ounce of respect he could muster, rolled his eyes until he saw stars. Byun Baekhyun and his temper of a wild boar. “So what’s the angle? If you’re trying to kill me, get in line.”  
  
“I can’t be assed, frankly,” Baekhyun answered, with a deliberate drawl in his words. “Word on the grapevine is you’ve been in contact with Kim Jongin. Any truth to that?”  
  
“I don’t play guitar ballads outside his window every fortnight, if that’s what you’re implying.”  
  
“You think you can bring him in to us for a little chat?”  
  
“What, like a tea-party?”  
  
“Sure. A couple of sniper rifles, a little torturing, our cousins at the Pentagon. Family gathering. Completely PG.”  
  
“Yeah, I see where you’re coming from, but no, I don’t know if Jongin’s the type to be interested in family gatherings,” Kyungsoo said. “Besides, after that Bourne fiasco I thoughtyou folks stopped trying to drive Ferraris.”    
  
“We’re not trying to drive him,” Baekhyun said. “We just don’t want to see other folks drive him either.”  
  
“So what, you’re asking me to put a hit on him?”  
  
Baekhyun sighed, obviously annoyed, “You think I wasted half a resource team hunting you down just to ask you to kill him? If I wanted Jongin dead he would’ve been wiped out eons ago. I want him alive, Kyungsoo. I want him talking, thinking, breathing, in working condition.”  
  
Without much deliberation Kyungsoo answered, “I don’t think I can.”  
  
“Rest in peace,” Baekhyun said, and the phone line went dead. Outside there was the sound of tires screeching. Slumping back into the couch, Kyungsoo picked at the lint balls on his sleeve.  
  
It wasn't altogether surprising that Baekhyun was still on Jongin’s tail. Jongin was the CIA's generation zero super-asset. From what Kyungsoo had heard, the NRA had bred him, trained him, genetically optimized him, then shipped him off to the CIA, where god knows how much funds were flushed putting him through field training. By the time he went official Jongin was all the grapevine could talk about for months. Whenever anyone spoke of him, even now, it was always about how young Jongin had been, how unthinkably, terrifyingly good. Except he went rouge during first year, bliped off the radar somewhere in Alaska. When he emerged again the Chinese had flipped him into the market’s top contract killer. Grapevine's new it boy became Kai, MVP of every other botched covert operation.   
  
Since then the CIA had tried to tag-team Jongin on several occasions, which soured quickly into a series of catastrophes. Finally, after Jongin sent their two-million dollar drone back in pieces, they threw in the towel. Jongin was clearly beyond their means, beyond the CIA, MI6, CIS, and every anonymous agent in Cairo stacked up together. Consensus had been that with what States was offering, if he wasn’t willing to take the deal, he wasn’t willing to take any deal. And that was fine. Without a team, without an agenda, Jongin was herbivorous. He posed a threat, sure, but he wouldn’t be able to do real damage, burn anything completely to the ground. Not on his own.   
  
Thus industry at large had a double-take when they began seeing Jongin work the political circuit again, surfacing at dinners and conferences in his expensive suits and unexpectedly well-ironed shirts. No one had any idea who hooked Jongin, when they hooked him or how, but the news alone, just the repercussions of what it might mean, probably scared the living shit out of Baekhyun. Jongin was the one agent Baekhyun could not afford to have loose, especially not under another agency’s wing. More than an intelligence breach Jongin had the potential to wipe out an entire nation. Entire nations. Probably the western hemisphere, depending on his agenda. So if Kyungsoo could hazard a guess his probably wasn’t the first number Baekhyun’s phoned in the past six years.   
  
But if Baekhyun was calling him, that meant he’d run out of options. And that he’d call again. Kyungsoo took another bite of his sandwich, switched on the TV, and waited.   
  
Almost immediately the phone rang again. This time Baekhyun wasn’t nearly as shrill, though probably five times as drunk.   
  
“OK, but seriously, please make an effort,” Baekhyun said.  
  
“You know that he could have me skinned and deboned head-to-toe in a minute flat."  
  
“Yes he could,” Baekhyun said, “But I could too.”  
  
Kyungsoo laughed.   
  
“Fine, so I can’t, but he didn’t either, even when he should have. And that’s what counts,” Baekhyun said, “Also I’m sure having your house gunned down to rubble is at least a minor inconvenience.”  
  
Kyungsoo walked to the windows and cautiously peered through one of the curtains. The sedans peered back at him, the GAU-17/As barrels glinting dully behind shaded windows. There wasn’t much of a choice at this point. It was the house, of course,  but Baekhyun had also pulled strings the few times he’d gotten tangled up with the wrong friends. Even if he was doing it so he’d have Kyungsoo in his pocket one day—today—Kyungsoo still owed him.   
  
“And honestly, if it turns to shit, maybe you could try killing him,” Baekhyun said.  
  
“Why, I thought you had the resources?”  
  
There was a pause. “Shut up.” And the line went dead for sure.   
  
  
  
  


 

♢

 

  
  
  
  
So the third time they met, Kyungsoo was the one to find him. He’d always imagined that Jongin belonged to one of those exclusive bars that hid all its inconceivable luxuries behind a quiet, obscured entrance, a material wonderland for those with so much money to burn that it must be done in private.  
  
Instead the Jongin he found was busy tossing back odd colored drinks at a cheap, smoky nightclub with terrible people and even worse music. Under the bar’s soft red backlighting his expression looked gentler than it had been that day in the hotel. Softer, but deadlier, too. For a second Kyungsoo contemplated turning back.  
  
“Hey, grasshopper,” Jongin called, stopping Kyungsoo in his tracks. His voice blended easily into the bass line pounding out the speakers. Kyungsoo met his gaze over the glass walls.  
  
“Fancy meeting you here,” Kyungsoo said, sliding onto the nearest seat. The leather cushion was sticky against his palms and the stool wobbled under his weight. Beside him, Jongin smelled like cologne and gunpowder and cigarettes. His hair, previously gelled, had come slightly dishevelled. There was the tiniest fleck of dried blood on his neck, but he was impeccably dressed, as always, a signet ring on his right hand and a watch on his left. Kyungsoo thought about the weight of the pen he’d used to sign Baekhyun’s contract and mildly regretted it.  
  
Humming, Jongin tapped his knuckles against the bar top.  The bartender refilled his glass with equal portions vodka and glow-in-the-dark syrup. Jongin downed the whole thing in one shot, then turned to Kyungsoo, his smile glinting in the dim lighting, “How’s retirement?”  
  
“Good. Boring, mostly. Job hunting. I’ve redecorated my house five times,” Kyungsoo answered, unconsciously memorizing all the liquor labels in sight before settling for whiskey anyway. Occupational hazard. “You should’ve just killed me.”  
  
“I would have loved to, but your confused face was telling me not to.”  
  
This was new. Kyungsoo scoffed contemptuously. “Are you fucking with me?”  
  
“No,” Jongin said, the corner of his lips rounding up as he looked Kyungsoo flat in the eye, “I’ve never wanted to fuck with you.”  
  
“Frankly—”  
  
“I just wanted to fuck you.”  
  
Kyungsoo stared at Jongin, at the curve of his mouth and his unreadable gaze, and thought that he must’ve been drunk, even if he hadn’t touched his glass. There was something feral, precise about the way Jongin moved, something feline, like he was constantly sliding back a thick, heavy thrum of power curled beneath his fingers. The pinstripe bespoke suit was, as much an armor, a check, like the thin casing of a small grenade. Watching Jongin made Kyungsoo wonder how it would feel, gazing into those eyes as Jongin slowly squeezed the life out of him, white-knuckled, teeth bared.  
  
In a blink his mouth had gone dry. In another, Jongin had him backed up against the washroom door, locking it with a hand wrapped around his waist and his nose trailing down Kyungsoo’s neck.  
  
“You planned this,” Kyungsoo realized, “You waited here because you knew Baekhyun had sent me.”  
  
Jongin said, pressing his body tight against Kyungsoo’s, the crook of a smile barely unveiling itself as he took Kyungsoo’s jaw in the palm of his hand, “I hope not to kill me.”  
  
“I could,” Kyungsoo said, though it was more a soundless stir of the tongue. And it was pointless, really, because Jongin already had his lips over his mouth, nudging it open. As Jongin ran his tongue over the roof of his mouth, Kyungsoo could taste hints of artificial cherry flavoring and spearmint off of him. It was an odd combination, albeit more than intoxicating enough to string him forward as Jongin pulled away.  
  
“You could _try_ ,” Jongin said, cocking his head in the only way that did not look arrogant, “Little one.”  
  
Kyungsoo fell back against the door, panting for air as he wiped the spittle off his chin. “I’m not little.”  
  
“Really?” Jongin said, then stumbled over himself.  
  
“How do you feel? Dizzy? Short of breath?” Kyungsoo smiled, holding Jongin up with a hand fisting his hair. For a veteran assassin, Jongin was surprisingly unguarded. Poisoning  his drink nearly made Kyungsoo feel bad.  
  
“No, I was only playing,” Jongin grinned, straightening up, “But why, do  _I_ look a little blurry? Is my voice funny?”  
  
The lights spun. Before Kyungsoo knew it the wall was sliding behind him. Everything had turned white.  
  
  
  
  


 

♢

  
  
  
  
  
A third way across the continent, in a country whose intelligence agency had long resigned to its fate, Byun Baekhyun, head of the NRA block, receives an unmarked cardboard box from Colonel Sanders. For the CIA unmarked cardboard boxes could hold many things—counter-terrorism agendas, off-the-grid field reports from intelligence agents buried for dead, receipts from the last action program you burnt to the ground. But when you’re at the NRA funneling gifts from the Pentagon, it’s usually secrets that had been buried so far beneath the crumbled skeletons that not even the skeletons would remember them, the ugly rumors, the particularly unsightly ones, the ones the paranoid schizophrenics at Princeton have  been locked up in asylums for postulating.   
  
“Listen, Baekhyun. You and I go back a long way, but we need to get this straight,” Sanders says. Tall, sinewy man, grew up in North Carolina, never lost his accent. He’s taken to pacing from one corner of Baekhyun’s office to the next. A nervous tick. Baekhyun knows, since he’s seen him into his promotion. He’s seen the man before him into his promotion too. “I have visibility over every action program in the system except yours. I need to know what it  _means_ when I try to do something, or see something, and the only feedback I get is that it hasn’t cleared the National Research Agency.”  
  
“I think it’s pretty clear what that means.”  
  
“I get it, you run a tight ship. When you obliterated Outcome, when you sent thirty-seven of our best agents to the grave hunting Kim, I turned a blind eye because I didn’t question how you did your job. When you reported Kim dead, it was my signature on that dotted line. My neck on the chopping board. So why am I reading about your contracting a MI6 shrapnel to hunt a ghost? Are you insane? Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”  
  
Baekhyun lets the colonel catch his breath, reaching for the box instead of answering. “Is this everything?”  
  
“Everything.”  
  
“And the surveillance footage, the idiot parade at the Interpol hasn’t seen it?”  
  
“Do you have to ask.”  
  
“It’s good to be thorough,” Baekhyun says, looking up with a polite smile. It doesn’t mean much around here but that was how his mother raised him. He takes the stack of documents and the CDs out of the box, dumps them in the metal garbage bin beneath his desk. “Take a seat, Colonel. Scotch?”  
  
“The British have been shooting us in the foot since Tinker Tailor and I’m flabbergasted you are actually gullible enough to think they’d just let our hands on their recycling.”   
  
Baekhyun takes out a tumbler for the Colonel, pours him the Scotch, then empties half the bottle into the garbage. He digs through his drawers, comes out with a packet of matches. “There’s a story I’ve heard once, from an old friend. His grandmother had an island, just off the shore of Japan. One summer, the island had a rat problem. But they had no traps, no poisons. How do you think they got rid of the rats?”  
  
Baekhyun strikes a match and drops it into the garbage. The two of them watches the documents curl and crumble, the fringe of red flickering as it spreads.   
  
“I’m not here to discuss your friend’s rat problem, Baekhyun, I’m here to get an answer on a potential Level 2 intel breach.”  
  
“His grandmother buried an oil drum, with coconuts wired onto the lid as bait. The rats would come for the coconut and they would fall into the drum. And when all the rats were in the drum, they didn’t throw it into the ocean. They didn’t burn it, either. They left the drum there, so that the rats grew hungry.  So the rats start eating each other, until there are only two left. The two survivors. Then they took those two, and they released them into the trees. Why? Because these two, they only eat rat. Hunger had changed their nature,” Baekhyun says. “Humans, rats, we’re not that different, you get me?”  
  
“Kim Jongin and that MI6 shrapnel walked in right through the front door, in broad daylight, blew up two freight ships and nearly sunk the state of New York back into the water. If we let them go then we might as pull our pants down and bend the fuck over.”  
  
“Colonel, we both know espionage doesn’t play the intimidation game. That’s what war is for, that’s your job, not mine. That’s the symptom, not the disease. NRA isn’t in charge of stuffing corpses into body bags or mass burials. We amputate limbs, slice out tumors. We stop the contagion at the source. This man you call shrapnel, his name is Do Kyungsoo. Rings any bells?”  
  
“Of course not. He hasn’t been on the charts for a year.”  
  
“He hasn’t been there because they’ve blacked him out of it. He’s been swimming the circus for seven years. No one hears of his ops because that was never the focus. Do Kyungsoo, the operations he was capable of running, that was MI6’s dark horse. When they terminated him it was because they couldn’t put a leash on him. Do Kyungsoo isn’t just highly trained. He is highly volatile and highly intelligent  _and he flaked_.”   
  
“How do you know Do Kyungsoo flipped on them?”  
  
Polishing off his drink, Baekhyun meets the Colonel dead in the eye. “He didn’t. I did. Kim Jongin isn’t a lone wolf anymore. He’s found a pack, one with deeper roots than the KGB even at its prime. If we wasted tens of millions just tracking him before, now that he has the financial support and the backing of major player we won’t even be able to see him. So I flipped Do Kyungsoo. Sure he might be a double, might cost us a level 2 breach. Who cares?”  
  
“Who _cares_?”  
  
“That’s just a paper cut compared to what Kim Jongin can do, which is gutting us and hanging us off the Empire State building by our intestines, with his bare hands,  _before breakfast_. And you can bet he’s motivated after the shit we’ve put him through. The bunch of whoopsies at MI6 doesn’t have half the heart to do what Kim Jongin can do, and  _will do_ , once we give him the chance. We can’t give him that chance. We’re doing our damned best not to. We took on Agent 007, Do Kyungsoo, because he’s our only hope at bagging this mess.”  
  
The fire has mostly tapered off now. Baekhyun kicks his garbage bin back in place.  
  
Sanders stares at the polished glean of Baekhyun's cherry-oak desk under the fluorescent lighting, then at Baekhyun. “Do Kyungsoo has better be good.”  
  
“That or very lucky."  
  
  
  
  


 

♢

  
  
  
  
  
Kyungsoo woke up, and it was almost predictable, really, in Jongin’s apartment. It didn’t take much for him to figure out it was his. There was a stuffed poodle on the fire mantel, a blank rifle, and a framed poster of the New York Ballet, so either there existed two trigger-happy ballerinas with an extreme dog complex on the planet, or it was just Jongin.  
  
“Hello,” Jongin poked his head through the door, “I was going to leave you there, but leaving an unconscious small thing in the grimy washroom of a cheap bar tugged on my moral heartstrings.”  
  
“Like you would have any,” Kyungsoo snorted. Jongin leaned on the door frame, crossing his arms. For the first time he was not wearing a tie or glasses or jacket, and maybe it was—no it probably, definitely was—the novelty of it, but Kyungsoo went breathless a bit at the way his shirt opened, just beneath the dip of his collarbones, and crinkled at his elbows, mapping out his shoulders with particular, sharp, precision. Jongin just, he looked so staggeringly, unexpectedly breath-taking. And it was insane. Here was a boy who could snap his neck faster than he could blink, a boy who could kill a hundred armed men in a song’s time, a boy who did nearly blow him into smithereens, and Kyungsoo had lost his breath like a little school girl. Or school boy. It scarcely mattered which.  
  
“So I’m guessing the CIA’s trying to poach me again,” Jongin said, rather pleasantly, as if the matter didn’t involve a lot of carnage and shrapnel and seven heavily armed Sedans, enough to blow a mansion to rubble, on rotation around Kyungsoo’s house.  
  
“Or kill you,” Kyungsoo volunteered, “I don’t think Baekhyun has a huge preference.”  
  
Jongin, the bastard, then looked Kyungsoo in the eye and asked, “Do you?”  
  
Of course Kyungsoo, who was weak to nothing in the world, who had been trained against pain, grief, depenetration agents, against torture, against hypnosis, buckled like he was in love and said, in a small, shaking mutter, “No,” which didn’t particularly matter, because it had been so small, and so shaky, that all Kyungsoo wanted to do was go back beneath the covers and strangle himself.  
  
“Care for some coffee?” Jongin asked. Probably, in the ideal textbook situation played back to agents in training, the scene would have Kyungsoo saying yes. The scene would have Kyungsoo trying to drug Jongin again. The scene would have Kyungsoo completing his assignment hassle-free.   
  
Instead Kyungsoo squeaked a refusal and went ambling out of the apartment building as if he knew where he was going, which he didn’t. And then it started raining, of course it did, because since the instant he met Jongin his life might well have been fictionalized for domestic consumption. Culled from MI6, hired by the CIA, played, drugged, and now newly lost.   
  
The rain in seconds turned into a torrential downpour, the sort that could sweep you away in a blink, like the sky was trying to flood the earth off its axis. Instantly Kyungsoo was soaked to the bone. His shoes were soggy. His shirt peeled to his back. He was still hazy and seeing double from whatever it was that Jongin had slipped him. And still lost of course, with no wallet, no phone, no money—  
  
There came a honk behind him.  
  
Jongin drove up parallel in the most unremarkable car, rolled the windows down, and leaned out asking, “Hey stranger, may I offer you a lift?”  
  
“I’m good,” Kyungsoo lied, mainly out of pride. Mostly out of pride. All out of pride, honestly, considering every hair on his body was screaming to get into the car and go somewhere warm and dry, quickly. Who cares if the guy driving the car means to kill him twelve ways in a minute.   
  
“At least accept this, please,” Jongin said, and a moment later proffered out from the window an umbrella.  
  
“Are you seriously giving me an umbrella?” Kyungsoo cried, incredulous, “The CIA put me on kill or capture. You had the chance to shoot me, strangle me, drown me, poison me, anything really, and you’re giving me an umbrella?”  
  
Jongin raised a single eyebrow. “Unless you’d like a ride after all?”

  
“No, thank you—” Kyungsoo stammered in spite of himself, “Thank you for the umbrella.”   
  
“Be careful,” Jongin said, and Kyungsoo was probably hallucinating at that point because Jongin couldn’t possibly have just winked at him, “It might stun you. Good night.”  
  
And Jongin was gone. There was no exploding coffee can this time, no dust, no fire, no smoke. The sky was a bruised blue, squeezing and unfurling. Jongin didn’t leave him to jump out of the 29th floor, though this was scarcely any better. Before him the path was clear and straight and oddly familiar. Too familiar. Kyungsoo blinked. Well shit, if he wasn't confused enough already.  

**Author's Note:**

> this wasn't edited 3.5 years ago. it still isn't. sorry 'bout that :(


End file.
